Wouldn't there be a regular exchange of any existing genetic information between planets already? There are meteorites from Mars found on earth. They weren't steralized. Do the enclosures and pockets of a lander make a big difference? Is a little bacteria okay, but a lot (or a larger variety of bacteria) dangerous? If bacterial contamination was going to happen, wouldn't it have already done so, at least to a very small degree?
I understand erring on the side of caution, but how likely is it that these saftey measures will really accomplish anything?
>The project was funded in part by the >Department of Energy, which hopes to create >microbes that would capture carbon dioxide in >the atmosphere...... ya mean, like plants do? I had a plant once. I developed it from a seed. But I was careful not to let it go outside or it might reproduce and DESTROY THE PLANET. AHHHH!!!
Microbes are already plentiful. They're not going to take over unless they have some tremendous advantage. One characteristic of life that has been cultivated by human beings is that it's usually more adapted to serving humans than it is to surviving by itself in the wild. Most of the plants that people harvest don't do well if they're left to their own devices. It isn't until you start making plants resistant to pesticides or pests that those genes pose a danger, because they escape and integrate themselves into weeds and give those plants an advantage ( a serious problem with plants of the mustard family which have weedy relatives ).
But things like bioremediation, where a plant can remove toxic lead from the soil, is not somthing that's going to spread like wildfire and take over the planet. There isn't such an amazing selective advantage to the trait that would make other plants survive longer if they had it. The traits we're discussing help us, the life forms that will be altered.
The Matrix taught me many important things about Religion and Philsophy. For example, Jesus knows Kung-Fu and shoots people. And... um... spoons aren't real.
I swear, next time someone says "There is no spoon" I'm going to throw a spoon at them.
>People who violently resist arrest or who use >violence in their protest risk being treated >with violence by the police.
I've had friends who claimed that because of some people who were separate from the organized protests that were smashing windows and looting (I don't know if these guys were from the government and doing what they did to provide a justification for a crackdown, or if they were just idiot opportunists) that a whole protest was treated as 'violent', and labeled so by the media. I trust their word more than yours.
>Of course parties do things that are in their >own interest. So would any new third party. >That's the nature of political parties.
But why should parties be given so many advantages in the political process as compared to individuals? The nature of American third parties isn't inherant in the democratic process. It's inherant to the American democratic process. There are independants at the state and local level. But the mechanics of our democracy make national campaigns very difficult for third parties. Even Perot couldn't get his name on the ballot in every state, while the major parties got this chestnut for free. Why don't they have to get signatures to get on the ballot too? What is the justification for their getting so many special priveledges? No sane third party candidate would run for president given these obstacles and very few have.
Presenting both/multiple sides of a story has long been a journalistic ethic. Europe and some other nations are actually working to codify this ethical obligation into law, a move I don't nessicarily agree with, but it has its benefits. Take a journalism class. If they discuss ethics, they'll discuss the need for covering both/multiple sides of a story.
>Whether you like it or not, the voice of some >anonymous individual participant in a >professionally organized protest is not going >to be given the same exposure or credence >that's given to an elected official.
It doesn't matter if a person is a defendant in a criminal case, if you're going to impugn them, you have an ethical obligation to get a statement from the defense. Whether your audience considers the response credible is up to your audience. A good journalist who is actually trying to ethically cover a story would get a quote from a protest leader as well as the police. The notion that you repeatedly present, that something "dosen't happen because people don't want it" is totally unsubstantiated, not to mention irrelevant. Either don't cover an event or present both sides of the story. If news is just about telling people things that they want to hear, it can't honestly be called news.
Freedom and democracy are liked inextricably because any people who cannot peacefully remove their government are not free.
So it's not so much that they're inextricably linked. It's that they're synonymous to you. People who can remove their elected officials peacefully are free. People who can't remove their elected officials, regardless of the number of personal liberties they have, are not free.
My argument, in contrast, is that democracy is not a 'yes or no' thing. There are many different ways to vote on a given issue, and the method of voting (approval voting, voting for one choice, ranking of preference) determines the outcome of the decision. The technical ideal is to get an outcome that is as 'representative as possible.' Of course, all of this ignores things like campaign contributions which effectivly undermine the democratic process on all but a few highly visible issues.
Go back and reread my post. I'm not talking about the arrest of protestors. I'm talking about peaceful protesters getting the shit kicked out of them by US marshalls. There have been tanks on US streets, and I do know it and you would too if you didn't believe everything you were spoonfed. Using violence to suppress dissent is not somthing foriegn to American soil. There's a long history of it in this country.
News organizations are not obligated to put anyone on the air for any amount of time.
Of course not, and again you're missing my point and responding to a different argument that you had in a different time and place. There are a lot of people who operate under the assumption that because we have 'freedom of speech' that the news presented by the media is accurate and balanced and this isn't true. It isn't true in China. It isn't true in America. Chinese don't know about the recent protests that happened in their country. Americans are given a spun version of the major protests in the US. What happens is entirely legal in both countries. That was my point about the subtelty of American censorship. I never once claimed that 'freedom of speech' entitled everyone to be heard. I claimed that the journalistic ethic of presenting different sides of the story has long since gone out the window and as informed consumers of information we should recognize this when listening to the news. The information most people are exposed to is as biased as the information given to people living under dictatorships.
Freedom and democracy? These are not binary yes-or-no things.
Ludicrous and naive. Of course you must be free to have a democracy, and, of course, if you have no democracy you are not free.
Again, you're completly missing my point. Imagine for a moment that the two major parties could automatically put their candidates on the ballot, but a third party had to get 10,000 signatures. Would this be an effective barrier to democracy, in that candidates would not have a fair chance to compete on a level playing field? Yes, it would. You could push this requirement up as high as you wanted. Maybe you need signatures from 10% of the citizens to get your name on the ballot. You still technically have a democracy. But the higher you push this number, the less representative your democracy would become. And in many states, after Ventura's election in Minnesota, the number of signatures a candidate needed to get a candidate's name on the ballot was raised. In other words, American democracy is becoming less representative.
You want to talk ludicrous and naive? Think for a moment about how ineffective third parties have been at the national level. Do you really, honestly believe that everyone capable of political leadership is packed into one of those parties? The legal barriers to getting a third party candidate on the ballot are enormous and only those people who radically disagree with certain mainstream policies and have enormous capital, political or otherwise, are willing to run. So you get nuts like Perot or Buchannan. To get on the ballot in a majority of the states requires time and money which would otherwise be devoted to campaigning. Party candidates automatically get their names on the ballot. How is that fair? And if some candidates have barriers that other candidates don't, is your democracy as representative as one which dosen't have this restriction.
If the two parties agree, your vote is not irrelevant. It just means you're in the minority and you lost.
This is an unsupported assumption. After Perot and Ventura, many states enacted new barriers to third party candidates. Was this because people the majority of voters wanted them to 'stop the third parties! stop the third parties!' No. It wasn't. It was because the parties themselves, acting as institutions and powerbrokers in their own right, were looking out for their own interests. Third parties may be good for us, but they're unequivocally ba
I don't see any U.S. Army troops and tanks on the streets of China killing people who steal CD's, either.
Judging from your post, I would guess you've just been watching the news and not actually going to the WTC protests in Seattle like some of my friends did. After a WTC protest, try checking around on the web for sites put up by the protesters. You're sure to see a few heads smashed and related things. America has it's own Tiannamen Squares if you really want to look for them. But usually American censorship is a lot more subtle. You can give an 'evildoer' person 25 seconds of airtime on a public news program as long as you interrupt them frequently. Its hard to explain a different worldview in 25 seconds with frequent interruptions, and the whole thing makes the news organization seem like it's being objective.
And there have been a number of laws passed raising the bar for what it would take to have a third party elected. Lets face it, we may have some control over national elections, but enough money can essentially force a consensus between the two parties and then we have zilch.
If the two parties agree, your vote is irrelevant. It's not like the multi-party systems found in some other democracies where you can have multiple viable parties.
Freedom and democracy? These are not binary yes-or-no things.
And while it's true that America (where I have citizenship) has a good deal more freedom than China (where I'm currently teaching English) there are a lot more comparisons which could be drawn between the two nations than most Americans would be comfortable with.
I know we've been conditioned by Kazaa, Gnutella, etc. to see these conflicts in a certain context but....
It seems that this is a question of whether the publishers have the right to give consent for this sort of thing, or whether that right is held by the author.
Authors frequently resell rights to their work, (look at some of the compilations Asimov got published later in his career) and the resale of these works are a major source of income. What Amazon has done is created a slippery slope sort of situation by which authors could lose some of their rights from the resale of their work and thus some of their income. The question is, whose consent is required for Amazon to do this, the publisher or the Author?
This is similar to the case of NYT vs. Tasani mentioned in the article, when freelance authors submitted news articles, and the publishers of those news articles not only published them in the agreed medium, but also submitted them to Lexis Nexis.
The District Court granted the Publishers summary judgment, holding, inter alia, that the Databases reproduced and distributed the Authors' works, in 201(c)'s words, "as part of... [a] revision of that collective work" to which the Authors had first contributed.
Publishers aren't stupid. They obviously agree with Amazon in thinking that this will increase book sales or else they wouldn't have agreed to it.
So this is more about what reproduction rights an author has sold to his publisher rather than whether Amazon's service will increase sales of a particular book.
You raise some very good points... but the publishers were happy and gave their consent, every last one of them.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that this is a question of whether the publishers have the right to give consent for this sort of thing, or whether that right is held by the author of the work.
This is similar to the case of NYT vs. Tasani, mentioned in the article, when freelance authors submitted news articles, and the publishers of those news articles not only published them in the agreed medium, but also submitted them to Lexis Nexis.
The District Court granted the Publishers summary judgment, holding, inter alia, that the Databases reproduced and distributed the Authors' works, in 201(c)'s words, "as part of... [a] revision of that collective work" to which the Authors had first contributed.
So this is more about what rights an author has sold to his publisher than it is about sales for a specific book.
I can already get lots of free books online on Kazaa... and I don't. Heck, I often buy a book even if the library has it, just because it's more convenient to have the book. Recipies aren't usually trade secrets, especially the ones printed in cookbooks. If I want a reciepe I can find it easily enough somewhere else on the internet. I find it very difficult to believe that this feature will do anything at all to hurt book sales.
Of course, the problem with law is that once you let a person do something once that sets a precedent...
There's always the fear of a slippery slope to keep the lawyers eating filet mingon.
'considering' should be changed to 'assuming'. Sorry about that. But even if we don't, how much will 3D really add to a story relative to what can be done now. Really, the most important thing now is making the films cheaper with 3D so that you can have people besides the largest studios producing films.
Well, you do have to admit that as special effects get better the returns diminish. Considering that we keep flat screens etc. how much more 'special' can the effects get? Three decades ago, story tellers didn't have the effects to properly render their stories to video. Now, by and large, they do.
Imagine that you make cars. You do so with the full knowledge that some of them are going to get into wrecks or be used by irresponsible drivers. How much responsibility do you have for making sure the cars you make are safe?
Well, if your cars are significantly more defective than average and you know it and you do nothing when you could do somthing, then you're certainly in trouble. If you're making Ford Pintos, and you know that a fair number of them will blow up when they get into accidents, even though those accidents are not directly your fault, you can still be held partly liable for the damage done.
But if your cars are less defective than average, it's unlikely that you'll be held responsible. Or to take it back to your example; you are responsible for following a reasonable standard of care with your guns, and that standard of care is very high. Knives would be a little lower because they're utensils. Computers have a pitifully low standard of care, if we're talking about the average user.
Ethics demands that we take reasonable precautions to protect others, even from their own actions, if we're involved with them. And those standards are typically based on societal norms. The question is, what society are you a part of; a society of average computer users or a society of geeks. Your answer to that would probably determine your ethical stance.
Your implication, I assume, being that you can't ever prove that something doesn't exit. But if you're going to make a statement that something exists, it stands to reason that you should be able to show some evidence of its existance, right? If you can't give any evidence that a thing exists, then what is your basis for claiming that it does?
There are people who take the corpus of scientific information as a religion. I've had to butt heads with them once or twice, and it was gratifying when later evidence was discovered that proved them wrong. And that's just it! Science has mechanisms to overthrow erroneous notions. Religion does not.
Science is composed of things that could potentially be disproven, but have not yet been disproven. The same cannot be said for religion. If it's impossible to offer any evidence that would disprove a theory, then that theory dosen't give us any useful information about the world around us. After all, any event could conceivably be explained by the theory.
The interpretations of data are often wrong. But at least the scientific method encourages people to not cook the data. Religions often have no such qualms. They want to support a foregone conclusion... have been predicted far too many times in the past for me to believe that we have any real clue about what the world around us is really like.
These predictions were not scientific, strictly speaking. Nobody is saying that Science is omniscent or always right. We're dealing with a gradation of truth, not a binary 'right/wrong' version of truth. It's imperfect and always will be. It's like xeno's (zeno's?) paradox, you keep moving closer to a predictive model of reality without ever completely arriving at it. It can be clearly demonstrated that relativistic physics is more predictive than Newtonain physics. But relativistic physics cannot be proven to be correct, only incorrect.
But if you have a better way of gaining an understanding of the material universe and removing false notions, please let us know.
Perhaps the difference is because words have connotative as well as denotative meanings?
What if when you had to go to the bathroom, you, an adult, said you had to "go potty". What would people think
What if you refered to your mother as your "mommy."
Or, conversely, what if you refered to your boss by saying "The overweight fucker in the ugly white shirt wants this done by tomorrow." That may technically be the same as "Mr. Arnold wants this on his desk tomorrow morning" but it's in terms of the respect and power relationships conveyed, the two are very different.
Some words refer to the same physical objects, but have different emotional impacts. These words are used by adults to express extreme emotion (and by kids for shits and giggles and to express rebellion).
Language isn't simply a tool for describing objects and actions. It is also used in many different ways to convey real and desired power relationships.
Um... why in Gods name would someone in Europe who is from Africa be a 'European African American'? If you're not from America, you're not an American.
Self criticism of an individual or group is always considered more polite than criticism from an outside source. I can say 'geez, that was stupid' if I do somthing that I shouldn't have. But if someone else says it, it starts to sound kindof negative. If you don't believe me, get up on a stage in front of a racially mixed audience and try doing one of Chris Rock's acts.
Of course, race is socially constructed and while other countries believe in race, the notions regarding race aren't identical.
A while ago Hollywood wanted to make a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. They had cast an African American in the role, only to have to pull the plug on the project when Sadat objected to a black man portraying him. Sadat, being the leader of Egypt, considered himself white. There are black-looking Arabs and Latin Americans who consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry.
Also, people from Venice, Sicily, etc. considered themselves to be Venitians, Sicilians etc. when they came to the US. Once here, they were slowly rebranded as 'Italians'.
If you need another example, look at Japanimation. Japanese characters often have caucasian features. Chinese characters have asian features. This comes directly from the Japanese conception of race.
What race you believe you're a part of depends at on where you live, not just who your parents were.
"African American" isn't just a national/racial group, but a national/racial identity.
Can they take pictures of the place on Mars where Brittany did her 'whoops, I did it again' video. Then have her autograph them. If they wanted, they could even shoot the photo in black and white and then 'color enhance' everything. The guys at NASA really seem to have fun doing it. And at least that way they could change Brittany's awful shade of lipstick
Its possible that they knew, but the answer was embarrasing. There's a huge gulf between reality and what the newspapers print. Ask anyone who's been to a protest against the WTO...
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't there be a regular exchange of any existing genetic information between planets already? There are meteorites from Mars found on earth. They weren't steralized. Do the enclosures and pockets of a lander make a big difference? Is a little bacteria okay, but a lot (or a larger variety of bacteria) dangerous? If bacterial contamination was going to happen, wouldn't it have already done so, at least to a very small degree?
I understand erring on the side of caution, but how likely is it that these saftey measures will really accomplish anything?
The above post should read;
The traits we're discussing help us, The traits we're discussing help us, not the life forms that will be altered.
>The project was funded in part by the >Department of Energy, which hopes to create >microbes that would capture carbon dioxide in >the atmosphere... ... ya mean, like plants do?
I had a plant once. I developed it from a seed. But I was careful not to let it go outside or it might reproduce and DESTROY THE PLANET. AHHHH!!!
Microbes are already plentiful. They're not going to take over unless they have some tremendous advantage. One characteristic of life that has been cultivated by human beings is that it's usually more adapted to serving humans than it is to surviving by itself in the wild. Most of the plants that people harvest don't do well if they're left to their own devices. It isn't until you start making plants resistant to pesticides or pests that those genes pose a danger, because they escape and integrate themselves into weeds and give those plants an advantage ( a serious problem with plants of the mustard family which have weedy relatives ).
But things like bioremediation, where a plant can remove toxic lead from the soil, is not somthing that's going to spread like wildfire and take over the planet. There isn't such an amazing selective advantage to the trait that would make other plants survive longer if they had it. The traits we're discussing help us, the life forms that will be altered.
"cognito cognito, ergo cognito sum"
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
The Matrix taught me many important things about Religion and Philsophy. For example, Jesus knows Kung-Fu and shoots people. And... um... spoons aren't real.
I swear, next time someone says "There is no spoon" I'm going to throw a spoon at them.
where's my tumor. :p
(very J.K.)
>People who violently resist arrest or who use >violence in their protest risk being treated >with violence by the police.
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I've had friends who claimed that because of some people who were separate from the organized protests that were smashing windows and looting (I don't know if these guys were from the government and doing what they did to provide a justification for a crackdown, or if they were just idiot opportunists) that a whole protest
was treated as 'violent', and labeled so by the media. I trust their word more than yours.
>Of course parties do things that are in their >own interest. So would any new third party. >That's the nature of political parties.
But why should parties be given so many advantages in the political process as compared to individuals? The nature of American third parties isn't inherant in the democratic process. It's inherant to the American democratic process. There are independants at the state and local level. But the mechanics of our democracy make national campaigns very difficult for third parties. Even Perot couldn't get his name on the ballot in every state, while the major parties got this chestnut for free. Why don't they have to get signatures to get on the ballot too? What is the justification for their getting so many special priveledges? No sane third party candidate would run for president given these obstacles and very few have.
Presenting both/multiple sides of a story has long been a journalistic ethic. Europe and some other nations are actually working to codify this ethical obligation into law, a move I don't nessicarily agree with, but it has its benefits. Take a journalism class. If they discuss ethics, they'll discuss the need for covering both/multiple sides of a story.
http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/AdoptedText/T
http://www.mtn.org/~newscncl/newsworthy/article
http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/data/jmrightreply
http://www.aceproject.org/main/english/me/mec03
>Whether you like it or not, the voice of some >anonymous individual participant in a >professionally organized protest is not going >to be given the same exposure or credence >that's given to an elected official.
It doesn't matter if a person is a defendant in a criminal case, if you're going to impugn them, you have an ethical obligation to get a statement from the defense. Whether your audience considers the response credible is up to your audience. A good journalist who is actually trying to ethically cover a story would get a quote from a protest leader as well as the police. The notion that you repeatedly present, that something "dosen't happen because people don't want it" is totally unsubstantiated, not to mention irrelevant. Either don't cover an event or present both sides of the story. If news is just about telling people things that they want to hear, it can't honestly be called news.
Freedom and democracy are liked inextricably because any people who cannot peacefully remove their government are not free.
So it's not so much that they're inextricably linked. It's that they're synonymous to you. People who can remove their elected officials peacefully are free. People who can't remove their elected officials, regardless of the number of personal liberties they have, are not free.
My argument, in contrast, is that democracy is not a 'yes or no' thing. There are many different ways to vote on a given issue, and the method of voting (approval voting, voting for one choice, ranking of preference) determines the outcome of the decision. The technical ideal is to get an outcome that is as 'representative as possible.' Of course, all of this ignores things like campaign contributions which effectivly undermine the democratic process on all but a few highly visible issues.
Go back and reread my post. I'm not talking about the arrest of protestors. I'm talking about peaceful protesters getting the shit kicked out of them by US marshalls. There have been tanks on US streets, and I do know it and you would too if you didn't believe everything you were spoonfed. Using violence to suppress dissent is not somthing foriegn to American soil. There's a long history of it in this country.
News organizations are not obligated to put anyone on the air for any amount of time.
Of course not, and again you're missing my point and responding to a different argument that you had in a different time and place. There are a lot of people who operate under the assumption that because we have 'freedom of speech' that the news presented by the media is accurate and balanced and this isn't true. It isn't true in China. It isn't true in America. Chinese don't know about the recent protests that happened in their country. Americans are given a spun version of the major protests in the US. What happens is entirely legal in both countries. That was my point about the subtelty of American censorship. I never once claimed that 'freedom of speech' entitled everyone to be heard. I claimed that the journalistic ethic of presenting different sides of the story has long since gone out the window and as informed consumers of information we should recognize this when listening to the news. The information most people are exposed to is as biased as the information given to people living under dictatorships.
Freedom and democracy? These are not binary yes-or-no things.
Ludicrous and naive. Of course you must be free to have a democracy, and, of course, if you have no democracy you are not free.
Again, you're completly missing my point. Imagine for a moment that the two major parties could automatically put their candidates on the ballot, but a third party had to get 10,000 signatures. Would this be an effective barrier to democracy, in that candidates would not have a fair chance to compete on a level playing field? Yes, it would. You could push this requirement up as high as you wanted. Maybe you need signatures from 10% of the citizens to get your name on the ballot. You still technically have a democracy. But the higher you push this number, the less representative your democracy would become. And in many states, after Ventura's election in Minnesota, the number of signatures a candidate needed to get a candidate's name on the ballot was raised. In other words, American democracy is becoming less representative.
You want to talk ludicrous and naive?
Think for a moment about how ineffective third parties have been at the national level. Do you really, honestly believe that everyone capable of political leadership is packed into one of those parties? The legal barriers to getting a third party candidate on the ballot are enormous and only those people who radically disagree with certain mainstream policies and have enormous capital, political or otherwise, are willing to run. So you get nuts like Perot or Buchannan. To get on the ballot in a majority of the states requires time and money which would otherwise be devoted to campaigning. Party candidates automatically get their names on the ballot. How is that fair? And if some candidates have barriers that other candidates don't, is your democracy as representative as one which dosen't have this restriction.
If the two parties agree, your vote is not irrelevant. It just means you're in the minority and you lost.
This is an unsupported assumption.
After Perot and Ventura, many states enacted new barriers to third party candidates. Was this because people the majority of voters wanted them to 'stop the third parties! stop the third parties!' No. It wasn't. It was because the parties themselves, acting as institutions and powerbrokers in their own right, were looking out for their own interests. Third parties may be good for us, but they're unequivocally ba
I don't see any U.S. Army troops and tanks on the streets of China killing people who steal CD's, either.
Judging from your post, I would guess you've just been watching the news and not actually going to the WTC protests in Seattle like some of my friends did. After a WTC protest, try checking around on the web for sites put up by the protesters. You're sure to see a few heads smashed and related things. America has it's own Tiannamen Squares if you really want to look for them. But usually American censorship is a lot more subtle. You can give an 'evildoer' person 25 seconds of airtime on a public news program as long as you interrupt them frequently. Its hard to explain a different worldview in 25 seconds with frequent interruptions, and the whole thing makes the news organization seem like it's being objective.
And there have been a number of laws passed raising the bar for what it would take to have a third party elected. Lets face it, we may have some control over national elections, but enough money can essentially force a consensus between the two parties and then we have zilch.
If the two parties agree, your vote is irrelevant. It's not like the multi-party systems found in some other democracies where you can have multiple viable parties.
Freedom and democracy? These are not binary yes-or-no things.
And while it's true that America (where I have citizenship) has a good deal more freedom than China (where I'm currently teaching English) there are a lot more comparisons which could be drawn between the two nations than most Americans would be comfortable with.
I know we've been conditioned by Kazaa, Gnutella, etc. to see these conflicts in a certain context but....
... [a] revision of that collective work" to which the Authors had first contributed.
It seems that this is a question of whether the publishers have the right to give consent for this sort of thing, or whether that right is held by the author.
Authors frequently resell rights to their work, (look at some of the compilations Asimov got published later in his career) and the resale of these works are a major source of income. What Amazon has done is created a slippery slope sort of situation by which authors could lose some of their rights from the resale of their work and thus some of their income. The question is, whose consent is required for Amazon to do this, the publisher or the Author?
This is similar to the case of NYT vs. Tasani mentioned in the article, when freelance authors submitted news articles, and the publishers of those news articles not only published them in the agreed medium, but also submitted them to Lexis Nexis.
The District Court granted the Publishers summary judgment, holding, inter alia, that the Databases reproduced and distributed the Authors' works, in 201(c)'s words, "as part of
Publishers aren't stupid. They obviously agree with Amazon in thinking that this will increase book sales or else they wouldn't have agreed to it.
So this is more about what reproduction rights an author has sold to his publisher rather than whether Amazon's service will increase sales of a particular book.
You raise some very good points... but the publishers were happy and gave their consent, every last one of them.
... [a] revision of that collective work" to which the Authors had first contributed.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that this is a question of whether the publishers have the right to give consent for this sort of thing, or whether that right is held by the author of the work.
This is similar to the case of NYT vs. Tasani, mentioned in the article, when freelance authors submitted news articles, and the publishers of those news articles not only published them in the agreed medium, but also submitted them to Lexis Nexis.
The District Court granted the Publishers summary judgment, holding, inter alia, that the Databases reproduced and distributed the Authors' works, in 201(c)'s words, "as part of
So this is more about what rights an author has sold to his publisher than it is about sales for a specific book.
I can already get lots of free books online on Kazaa... and I don't. Heck, I often buy a book even if the library has it, just because it's more convenient to have the book. Recipies aren't usually trade secrets, especially the ones printed in cookbooks. If I want a reciepe I can find it easily enough somewhere else on the internet. I find it very difficult to believe that this feature will do anything at all to hurt book sales.
Of course, the problem with law is that once you let a person do something once that sets a precedent...
There's always the fear of a slippery slope to keep the lawyers eating filet mingon.
Gary Larson cartoons, of course.
'considering' should be changed to 'assuming'. Sorry about that. But even if we don't, how much will 3D really add to a story relative to what can be done now. Really, the most important thing now is making the films cheaper with 3D so that you can have people besides the largest studios producing films.
Well, you do have to admit that as special effects get better the returns diminish. Considering that we keep flat screens etc. how much more 'special' can the effects get? Three decades ago, story tellers didn't have the effects to properly render their stories to video. Now, by and large, they do.
Imagine that you make cars. You do so with the full knowledge that some of them are going to get into wrecks or be used by irresponsible drivers. How much responsibility do you have for making sure the cars you make are safe?
Well, if your cars are significantly more defective than average and you know it and you do nothing when you could do somthing, then you're certainly in trouble. If you're making Ford Pintos, and you know that a fair number of them will blow up when they get into accidents, even though those accidents are not directly your fault, you can still be held partly liable for the damage done.
But if your cars are less defective than average, it's unlikely that you'll be held responsible. Or to take it back to your example; you are responsible for following a reasonable standard of care with your guns, and that standard of care is very high. Knives would be a little lower because they're utensils. Computers have a pitifully low standard of care, if we're talking about the average user.
Ethics demands that we take reasonable precautions to protect others, even from their own actions, if we're involved with them. And those standards are typically based on societal norms. The question is, what society are you a part of; a society of average computer users or a society of geeks. Your answer to that would probably determine your ethical stance.
"Prove to me X exists". I say prove it doesn't.
.. have been predicted far too many times in the past for me to believe that we have any real clue about what the world around us is really like.
Your implication, I assume, being that you can't ever prove that something doesn't exit. But if you're going to make a statement that something exists, it stands to reason that you should be able to show some evidence of its existance, right? If you can't give any evidence that a thing exists, then what is your basis for claiming that it does?
There are people who take the corpus of scientific information as a religion. I've had to butt heads with them once or twice, and it was gratifying when later evidence was discovered that proved them wrong. And that's just it! Science has mechanisms to overthrow erroneous notions. Religion does not.
Science is composed of things that could potentially be disproven, but have not yet been disproven. The same cannot be said for religion.
If it's impossible to offer any evidence that would disprove a theory, then that theory dosen't give us any useful information about the world around us. After all, any event could conceivably be explained by the theory.
The interpretations of data are often wrong. But at least the scientific method encourages people to not cook the data. Religions often have no such qualms. They want to support a foregone conclusion.
These predictions were not scientific, strictly speaking. Nobody is saying that Science is omniscent or always right. We're dealing with a gradation of truth, not a binary 'right/wrong' version of truth. It's imperfect and always will be. It's like xeno's (zeno's?) paradox, you keep moving closer to a predictive model of reality without ever completely arriving at it. It can be clearly demonstrated that relativistic physics is more predictive than Newtonain physics. But relativistic physics cannot be proven to be correct, only incorrect.
But if you have a better way of gaining an understanding of the material universe and removing false notions, please let us know.
What's wrong with mass drivers?
You forgot "Schwarzenegger and Coleman running in the same primary"
Isn't probability already a part of chip design.
"Our new P4 has a 40% probability of being out in May, a 20% chance of being out in June..."
Are 90% of /.ers really closet pedophiles?
Well, considering that only 10% of the posts here have been open about it, that would leave about 90% still in the closet.
Perhaps the difference is because words have connotative as well as denotative meanings?
What if when you had to go to the bathroom, you, an adult, said you had to "go potty". What would people think
What if you refered to your mother as your "mommy."
Or, conversely, what if you refered to your boss by saying "The overweight fucker in the ugly white shirt wants this done by tomorrow." That may technically be the same as "Mr. Arnold wants this on his desk tomorrow morning" but it's in terms of the respect and power relationships conveyed, the two are very different.
Some words refer to the same physical objects, but have different emotional impacts. These words are used by adults to express extreme emotion (and by kids for shits and giggles and to express rebellion).
Language isn't simply a tool for describing objects and actions. It is also used in many different ways to convey real and desired power relationships.
Um... why in Gods name would someone in Europe who is from Africa be a 'European African American'? If you're not from America, you're not an American.
Self criticism of an individual or group is always considered more polite than criticism from an outside source. I can say 'geez, that was stupid' if I do somthing that I shouldn't have. But if someone else says it, it starts to sound kindof negative. If you don't believe me, get up on a stage in front of a racially mixed audience and try doing one of Chris Rock's acts.
Of course, race is socially constructed and while other countries believe in race, the notions regarding race aren't identical.
A while ago Hollywood wanted to make a film about Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. They had cast an African American in the role, only to have to pull the plug on the project when Sadat objected to a black man portraying him. Sadat, being the leader of Egypt, considered himself white. There are black-looking Arabs and Latin Americans who consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry.
Also, people from Venice, Sicily, etc. considered themselves to be Venitians, Sicilians etc. when they came to the US. Once here, they were slowly rebranded as 'Italians'.
If you need another example, look at Japanimation. Japanese characters often have caucasian features. Chinese characters have asian features. This comes directly from the Japanese conception of race.
What race you believe you're a part of depends at on where you live, not just who your parents were.
"African American" isn't just a national/racial group, but a national/racial identity.
Can they take pictures of the place on Mars where Brittany did her 'whoops, I did it again' video.
Then have her autograph them. If they wanted, they could even shoot the photo in black and white and then 'color enhance' everything. The guys at NASA really seem to have fun doing it. And at least that way they could change Brittany's awful shade of lipstick
Its possible that they knew, but the answer was embarrasing. There's a huge gulf between reality and what the newspapers print. Ask anyone who's been to a protest against the WTO...